In Where I Grew Up, the emotional centerpiece of his new album, Kenny Chesney faces an age-old country dilemma: watching the woman he loves about to walk out the door. "The boy in me said, 'Let her go,' " he sings. "The man in me said, 'Pull her close'/It was time to find out which one I was." Not so long ago, Chesney might have let her walk, figuring that finding another love wouldn't be much harder than finding his favorite song on the car radio. But the Chesney of Hemingway's Whiskey — the singer's first album after a year out of the spotlight — has changed.

Chesney is still a guy who'll lead an album with a paean to high school football (The Boys of Fall) and consider "going coastal on you" when life's stresses bear down (Coastal), but he has grown wiser. He's more contemplative and less nostalgic, and his old romances are a little more about the relationship than the setting. In the Guy Clark-written title track, he muses, "There's more to life than whiskey/There's more to words than rhyme." For a country singer, that's the kind of admission that means nothing's ever going to be as easy as it used to be. — Brian Mansfield

Seal's latest album reunites the singer/songwriter with megaproducer David Foster, who manned the boards for his 2008 covers album, Soul. Here again, Foster's robust but tasteful arrangements are a perfect fit for Seal's distinctive gruff/smooth vocals; they also suit his new songs, which embrace the joys and challenges of keeping a good thing going. It's fine adult-contemporary pop. — Elysa Gardner

Though he has been in prison for seven months, Wayne has managed to keep fans hungering for his next opus. They'll have to wait until after he gets out in November for the release of Tha Carter IV, but meanwhile, he's not going to let these stashed-away songs go to waste. With the help of friends like Drake, Jay Sean and Nicki Minaj, he has enough hits here to make sure he's not missed much. — Steve Jones

Musicologists and really old Boomers might warm to this middle-of-the-road assemblage of jazz standards, obscure country-blues and originals. But with a few notable exceptions, blues-rock guitar junkies will find the genteel, all-star-laden (J.J. Cale, Steve Winwood, Wynton Marsalis) approach about as inspiring as the album title. The keepers — especially Clapton's duet with Sheryl Crow on the original Diamonds Made From Rain and the burning blues Can't Hold Out Much Longer— don't nudge this into the must-listen category. — Jerry Shriver

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